Cupid's Middleman

by Edward B. Lent

"These fashionable glasses always cut my mouth," he replied, wrinkling his brow to emphasize his dislike for the fads of the aristocracy.

But when an out-and-out city man goes to the country, he can't see anything; it's all just like Central Park, in that there are no houses to be seen, only it's not laid out so well nor raked so clean. I have often seen these chaps when they came up to our place. The city man is as blind as a cave fish, and all he wants to know is when do they eat and are there any mosquitoes and poison ivy. The air suits him, only it's a little too strong; and the dirt is satisfactory—all else is away below par, and if it weren't for the air and the dirt, which the country-bred city doctor has told him the kids need, he'd like to be home, where he can be sociable in his sub-stratum of atmospheric poison, amid the clatter that consumes his vital forces and keeps him pleasantly anæmic and tolerably dead.

Did you ever go through the woods with a native New Yorker? There has been an incessant stream of startling things running before his eyes since his birth, with plenty of noise, dust and expense, so that when he is thrown out into the fields or the woods he finds he can't be one of Nature's Quakers and hold communion with the silent worshippers through whom the Spirit speaks. His outdoor religion is in the Salvation Army class, and he can't warm up enough to admire a potted geranium unless he hears a bass drum or a hand organ to distract him on the side. If the sweet air and comforting silence of the country were to fall upon New York, the town would probably drop to even lower levels from the shock. The country boy, who has been used to concentrating on the wood-pile, runs the country; or, if it happens to be a city boy who runs it, he is a fellow who had the wood-pile grafted onto him in time to save his career. Gabrielle Tescheron, the woman in a new field, saw the world aright; there was no mystery for her at any time. Her intuitions guided her unerringly while we who reasoned became entangled.

Shrewdness in the country lad, however, is not commended very highly by me. It may be that the country boy has been tutored by the most unscrupulous politicians that ever got out a big vote on a moral issue—usually the one coined at the mint with unanimous consent and a cry for more: "In God We Trust." If the country boy has fallen, it may be that he was blinded by this, so that when he came to the city and took the prizes he used the same old methods. We find some of these shrewd country lads with abundant health, close observers, selling their birthrights here in the sort of deals that were regarded as clever in up-country politics, and so became legitimate in their eyes.

There's more politics in the country than they can dilute in their sermons, although they absorb about thirty times as many of these as the city man. Some day all the country fathers will reform, even if they have to change their politics and half of them die because of it. They will think it more worth while to save their sons than to save the country.

What about the morality of the city man? It isn't a factor because he isn't.

If the management of our affairs had been entrusted to Gabrielle Tescheron there would have been no trouble. Had her father been a wise man and allowed this only child to have her way—to have noted the whole situation from her fresh view-point, he would have found peace where he found an abundance of perplexing conditions and ample expense closely adhering to every bramble bush into which the tactics of Smith hurled him. Gabrielle could not save him and she did not try. Where the cause of the trouble is idiocy of the Tescheron quality, it has to go through a long course of pulverization, maceration and cure; if you hurry the process, the goods will be sour and hurt the business, if the lot gets out under the trade-mark. The best thing to do with it is to send it to the coal heap, for if you try to get your money back at a Front Street auction room, some hand-cart syndicate will nab it and cut your price. They'll undersell the direct trade, and when you have finished writing an explanation to the men on the road, you'd wish you had eaten the whole carload yourself.

It was part of the wisdom of this remarkably prudent young woman to thoroughly comprehend—by some of those fresh intuitions, probably—that her truly repentant father would plead for her forgiveness and ask her blessing upon his prodigal return only after a long, long wrestle with the wholesalers in blasted reputations, who so showily presented designs for a disgraced suitor that pleased him greatly. He had placed an order with these architects of infamous character to build one according to the plans and specifications presented, and as the construction work progressed there were extras, extras, extras! Gabrielle knew of these and never murmured. To her father's urgings, she guardedly replied:

"My dear father, I know my heart and I know yours. Some day you, too, will reach the truth and we shall again be happy."

There was no mystery in this situation for Gabrielle Tescheron, as I have stated. She would not tolerate it. At the time her father and myself were confused, she was sure of herself. He thought of his family, and I of my reputation, whose spots had never been advertised. Gabrielle thought only of Jim.